PCTest.pc file appears on Storage Card after Diagnostic or device repair on hp or Ericsson devices

Applies To

• Windows CE 1.0
• Windows CE 2.0, SP1
• Handheld PC Professional, SP1
• Handheld PC 2000

Overview

After you successfully compete the hp Diagnostic boot agent, or receive your device back from Hewlett Packard or Ericsson for repair the file PCTest.pc is present in main RAM or on one of your attached Storage Card devices.

More Info

As part of the testing process performed by the equipment diagnostics or by the OEM. The file PCTest.pc will be generated during the PCMCIA card iteration cycle.
The file is generated by the self diagnostic application 'Luke Diagnostics' - later renamed 'hp Diag' which exists on all hp and Ericsson devices.

The diagnostic routine writes a fixed length file of 430,080 bytes (420KB) in to the first available set of clusters on any available mass storage device detected in either the PCMCIA or CF Slots.
The PCTest.pc file is an ASCII document and contains a full dump of the Windows CE Character map, repeated to fill out into available free space up to 420KB on the storage device.

As part of the diagnostic the file is then used to carry out random cluster read / write operations as well as full read and write back (update) actions. The task is deemed successful if the file size at the end of the process matches that of the lead-in size. Once complete the diagnostic program does not delete the PCTest.pc file from the Windows CE file system, allowing an engineer to view the character map if necessary.

If you have located this file on a storage card or in internal RAM - from a RAM test. You can safely delete this file from your device.